The Content-to-commerce Maverick

In July last year, you restructured the Group’s businesses into three divisions -- Good Brands, Good Media and Good Creator. Why did you feel the need to break the P&L like this?

Each of these businesses has a very unique DNA and very different metrics that they should be evaluated on. For Media, it is about the reach, engagement and virality metrics that the content produced generates. For Creator, it is the number of active creators on the platform and the amount of money each creator is making through the platform. While for Brands, it is about understanding consumer needs, creating innovative products, driving new customer acquisition, and ensuring there are high repeat rates with increasing average order value while reducing marketing costs and increasing margins. 

We realised that we needed three different organisations, with different leadership, different goals and separate P&Ls. Today each of our verticals is run by strong leaders that have a clear mandate to make each vertical profitable. 

At present, what is your strongest growth driver?

Our biggest growth driver is undoubtedly our Content Creator engine which has ensured that every brand we have bought in 2021 has grown between 200 per cent to 400 per cent in the last year. This strategic moat is proprietary and allows us to cross-sell every new brand to our existing customer base. We have 12 million transacted customers and have a 12-month retention rate of 45-50 per cent. This high new user acquisition coupled with extremely strong repeat behaviour is fuelling our growth. 

Our acquisition strategy too, in fact, was not to fuel growth but to fill up all the pieces of our strategic ‘Content Creator Commerce’ puzzle. Every asset was well-thought out for what the synergy will be with the group.

The creator economy is constantly changing in India. How do you ensure it continues to deliver in your ‘Content Creator Commerce’ proposition?

Our mantra is fairly straightforward. Creators along with our content platforms create engaging content. Our content platforms like POPxo, ScoopWhoop etc. then generate organic impressions on social media through this content. In some of these organic impressions, we insert the discovery of our beauty brands. This can lead consumers to our commerce platforms to transact, which enables us to acquire customers cost-effectively. 

While this doesn’t change, the type of content that is created, from articles to videos, long-form to short-form, the studio produced to user-generated, or the platforms where they will get consumed, from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, will keep evolving and we hope to be ahead of the curve there.

On your Brands side of the business, how do you prioritise and balance product innovation and price affordability?

This is something we try to balance every day. As a company, we are committed to ensuring we understand our consumers better than anyone else, and then create highly differentiated products that genuinely solve their needs and problems. If you don’t create a great product, irrespective of the price, the consumer will not buy your product. Thus, product innovation always wins the debate internally at the Good Glamm Group.

Please tell us more about your marketing and brand-building strategies, especially in ecommerce, where brand loyalty is a concern. 

The key to building a great brand is high innovation in products and disruptive marketing. As your brand gets stronger, loyalty starts coming in and retention rates get stronger. By being direct-to-consumer, i.e. acquiring the customer on our proprietary platforms, we ensure that we can directly communicate and connect with the customer, which is something most brands cannot do. This drives higher loyalty. But one must continue to invest in brand building. 

We are amid an investment winter even though some companies have beaten it. How will you describe your experience?  

Undoubtedly funding has slowed down dramatically in 2022, and we expect this to continue in 2023. This is a wonderful time for companies to tighten their ship, focus on making the unit economics very sound and profitable and build the foundation for a solid cash-generative business. This is what every entrepreneur should be focussing on.

What are your plans towards IPO, fundraising or attracting investments for your business? 

We are not looking to raise funds currently unless a large acquisition opportunity comes up. We will most likely do a pre-IPO round next year and aim for the IPO end of 2024 or early 2025.

How are you seeing 2023 pan out for your company?

This year is an exciting one for us. We expect the India business to hit profitability. We will be launching in several international markets. And we will also enter the men’s category. All in all, we have much to achieve in 2023.